The funding entities, regardless of their affiliation, have no influence on the research

Or so says Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And yet we discover that Soon’s research was (partially) funded by Southern Company Services, with whom Soon had and agreement, signed by Smithsonian’s William J. Ford, contract and grant specialist; and Bryan Baldwin, Southern’s manager of environmental assessment.:

As further consideration to SCS [Southern Company Services], Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for comment and input, if any, from SCS

The assertion of no influence doesn’t make sense, if there’s a special agreement in place for SCS to read proposals and comment in advance. Some part of the text isn’t true.

Thanks Steve- the Greenpeace article has at long last clarified Soon’s Harvard affiliation– he ain’t.

The ‘Harvard -Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ‘ is the name of the warren of buildings surrounding the Harvard College Observatory atop Observatory Hill. Soon is affiliated with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory there, not the colocated Harvard Astronomy Department, or the confusingly named Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , They have separate entrances, staffs and libraries, the SAO being the go to institution when you want to do a space experiment or build an orbital instrument or planetary probe..

Right wing ideologues complain all the time about scientists being corrupted by their funding, and suggest that they are only in it for the grant money. Because of this, their findings about climate change are fraudulent.

But when one of their own is called out for being corrupted by funding – suddenly he isn’t influenced by who provides the funds and its all above board.

One of the ‘problems’ with the internet is it’s increasingly inhabited by young people and foreigners (i.e., under 50 and not from the USA). I say this not because ‘old and American’ equals good, but because we older Americans at least share a lexicon based on common experiences with the virulent disease known as the modern (post-Vietnam) political conservative.

Going back to Ronald Reagan, conservatives have become defined by their hypocrisy. It is a general rule that whenever Republicans accuse someone of something, they are themselves guilty of that thing.

Conservatives read Orwell’s 1984 and said, Hey, what a great idea! They have turned hypocrisy not only into a winning political strategy, but practically an art form.

It matters not the subject at hand; climate change, economics, foreign policy, etc,. etc. There is almost nothing of substance left in the American political conservative movement that is not at it’s core hypocritical.

“Is there a different standard when a libertarian or industry group does the same, as with this example of a NASA request by Christopher Horner, the same lawyer whose fresh requests to the space agency helped inspire the science group’s statement?”

“Strategic Fishing Litigation is the cornerstone of E&E Illegal Institute, which is accomplished through two practice areas: Petition Fishing Litigation (lawsuits) and Transparency Fishing (FOIA filings). Its illegal activities are dedicated to originating and supporting actions to protect against government underreach, restore an unhealthy relationship between responsibility to the environment and the free market essential to its destruction, and to secure the unconstitutional and other fundamental wrongs of the free market.”

1) A prior review clause is rare in this game, most funders know better.
2) The way this works, in a continuing funding relationship, is that somebody proposes some work officially, but of course have talked unofficially.
3) Then at end of time, they say what they did, and funders take that into account for the next grant request.
One can easily find examples of this cycle in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, as Heartland, CEI, etc beg for money from Big Tobacco, extolling the good work they’ve done over the year.

The FOIA requests you point to are one reason I’ve become dubious about Revkin. I first heard of him in Mark Bowen’s Censoring Science, which described his good reporting on the Bush administration’s distortion of climate-change science. But equating the Greenpeace FOIA request RE: Willie Soon with the CEI’s — which basically says, “Dear NASSA (sic): Please send us copies of all your documents produced since 2000 — is IMO false equivalence.

With the contractual obligation to provide a pre-publish copy of research for “input” one has to wonder, where are the emails that contain this information? I am betting dollars to doughnuts that these emails were not released as part of the FOIA because they have a private confidentiality clause as part of public/private communications? I would love to see a lawsuit working to get THOSE emails released!

Whether the source of funding might affect the direction and results of the research is a matter of the integrity of the scientists All research requires funding, sometimes the funding bodies have a vested interest in the outcome of the work.
That does not automatically imply that the scientists involved will willing or with coercion be selective in their reports, or deliverables.

But What Soon seems to have done is not a matter of personal conscience. All credible research list the source of funding in the acknowledgements or as the affiliations or the authors.

The problem is that in the recent Monckton et al paper claimed that there were no affiliations of relevance as they all did the work in their own ‘free’ time.

As it was the first issue of the Science bullitin perhaps they had not established a code of conduct for disclosure of funding sources, but such is generally considered standard practise, the omission of any accurate disclosure of funding by Soon on this paper, with just his affiliation with the smithsonian mentioned is the act that crosses the line I think, not the funding source.

Although the prevalent theme of any research that has had W Soon as one of the authors might give rise to the slight suspicion that the deliverables have been cooked to the taste of the funders.

I’m not bothered at all by the use of the word “deliverables”: grants often list “publication of a paper” as a “deliverable”. Even the review clause is ok. That would only be wrong if the clause said, “the funder must have an opportunity to _approve_ the paper before submission”, but review & comment is acceptable.

Not disclosing said funding is of course, inappropriate.

And the bad “science” was… well, just that. It is a pity that there are people out there who are willing to fund things just to have the results out there that they want, and it is a pity that there are politicians who will highlight studies with the results they want with no regards for quality.

But I’m not sure concentrating on where the funding is coming from is the right approach at an individual level. (at a macro level, yes: if all the papers saying X come from an industry which wants X, and every paper funded independently says Y, that means something).

The papers themselves weren’t very important, except as building blocks in campaigns to confuse the public.
Read the 131-pager PDF and look at the talks Soon gave. Some of them are actual science conferences, many are places like Heartland, Doctors for disaster Preparedness, Ayn Rand Institutes.

“Davies drew attention to Soon’s funding disclosures last month after Soon and three colleagues published a paper in the Chinese journal Science Bulletin that presented results from a simple climate model to argue that burning all recoverable fossil fuel reserves would result in little more than 2.2°C warming. By comparison, models assessed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on average project around 4° of warming with unabated fossil fuel use by 2100 and further warming beyond that time. The paper was appended with the statement: “The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.” Davies wrote to the journal insisting that Soon’s past funding sources do constitute a conflict of interest that should have been reported.

Science Bulletin’s conflict of interest policy states that authors must disclose “all relationships or interests that could influence or bias the work,” including “professional interests or personal beliefs that may influence your research.” The policy also gives a series of example disclosures. The first reads, “Author A has received research grants from Company A.”

Lead author Christopher Monckton, a British viscount and former journalist who now serves as chief advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute, a climate-advocacy group in Haymarket, Virginia, that disputes human-caused global warming, contends that there was no conflict on the Science Bulletin paper and that all of the authors, including Soon, completed the work on their own time. In an e-mail to Nature, he rejected the allegations by Davies as “manifestly untruthful and malevolent.”

Davies says that Greenpeace has requested Soon’s annual reports to Southern Company for the years 2013 and 2014 to determine whether either of them list the paper in Science Bulletin as a ‘deliverable’.”

Fuck me! If the Monkers ‘paper’ does show up as a ‘deliverable’ then … he is going to take a gigantic, beyond infinity, one UP the backside! Please excuse my French.

The 131 page pdf document includes legal agreements with the following paragraph under the heading of “Publicity”

“Smithsonian shall not publish and utilize the name or otherwise identify SCS or its affiliate companies in any publications or other advertisements without the express written consent of SCS. As further consideration to SCS, Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for
comment and input, if any, from SCS.

In my experience, an organization that provides research funding usually wants to receive credit. Here we see the opposite.This would seem to indicate a clear desire to underplay any connection between the source of the funding and the deliverables. ”

Soon’s publications would be of very little internal use to SCS – the obvious inferences are that SCS was looking to influence public opinion and Soon knew this and was willing to do business.

Standard language for a huge swath of papers from many fields would be something like “funding agency played no role in the design, interpretation, etc. etc. of this work”- Soon is an embarrassment and the Smithsonian whatever is likely quite embarrassed.

“As it was the first issue of the Science bullitin perhaps they had not established a code of conduct for disclosure of funding sources,”

izen, it wasn’t really the first issue *and* they have a quite clear policy in place. Very first example the journal provides:
“Author A has received research grants from Company A.”
Can’t be much clearer than that with respect to Soon.

The Times has given Soon an easy out by
taking him exteraneously to task on mercury from coal burning , in that US atmosperic release from geothermal and volcanic activity is objectively several orders of magnitude larger than the 42 tonnes thermal plants emit annually.

The assertion of no influence doesn’t make sense, if there’s a special agreement in place for SCS to read proposals and comment in advance.

I understand that clauses like this are routine in corporate-funded research, because there may be a non-disclosure agreement involved. That’s one of the issues with biomedical research in particular: negative outcomes of clinical trials are much less likely to be published than positive outcomes. And a clause like this might even be reasonable when proprietary information (e.g., a commercial product under development) is involved. But for the kind of research (and I use the term loosely) Soon does, the only intellectual property to protect is what Soon writes in his proposals and papers. There isn’t any reason for Soon to have signed an NDA, because there is nothing that could plausibly be covered by an NDA.

And I presume that not only is Ms. Pulliam naive, she has never worked for a medical research institute. Research physicians are routinely accused of being shills for Big Pharma. Sometimes the accusation has merit, but most of the time it does not (see the archives of your blogmate Orac for examples–as he documents, many of the people who make the “pharma shill” accusation are themselves selling expensive supplements). Government agencies, who provide most of the funding for SAO and CfA, usually want to produce good research, and don’t have much interest in the outcome beyond, in NASA’s case, successful launch and operation of spacecraft. But private companies and foundations can and usually do have an agenda. That’s why most journals require authors to disclose that the research was funded by $GRANT_NUMBER from $FUNDING_AGENCY. When $FUNDING_AGENCY is a private company, readers need to know that fact so they can evaluate the research accordingly.

I see the nondisclosure agreement as a breach of responsibility by Harvard. No university or university-attached organization should be making such agreements with a private company, and the administration should be hit hard for doing so. I do realize that there are issues about doing defense research, although there were major fights about secret research for DOD in the 1970’s which moved most of it off campus.

So, I Google mapped Willie ‘Scatologist to the Stars’ Soon’s current office location at Harvard (it’s an outhouse) and found out that both Daniel J. Jacob and Helen M. Amos frequently go there for them to poop on Soon.

Mitch: as best as I can tell, Harvard* has nothing to do with this.
The Harvard-Smithsonian C fA is one of those joint entities found on unveirsity7 campuses, but Willie has always been with the Smithsonian side, money came that way.
Of course, Harvard name is useful.

Hmm. I believe I see signs of selective memory here. If I recall correctly, Muller received far more from the Koch brothers. That doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone.

[You appear to be suffering from selective memory. Muller talked an awful lot of bollox, and got stick for it; e.g. http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/04/05/muller-is-rubbish/. I wasn’t terribly interested in the funding, but plenty of others were. However, the main point about Muller was that when the totally-obvious-to-everyone-except-Muller results came in, he recanted most of his bullshit. Not all of it, of course; he’s still in the Mann-is-fat camp with you. But even Muller isn’t fool enough to discuss land temperatures on an aqua planet. See-also

Nor does Exxon’s hundred million dollar grant to Stanford. Nor for that matter Shell’s and BP’s contributions to the CRU.

Funny that. It would almost seem as if this controversy were seized upon to paper over accounts of another story in the news. I believe Google News returns 187,000 results for the search string ‘pachauri sexual harassment.’

“Funny that. It would almost seem as if this controversy were seized upon to paper over accounts of another story in the news. I believe Google News returns 187,000 results for the search string ‘pachauri sexual harassment.’”

[Well, your slightly longer message is “Al Gore is fat, I hate Mann and Jones”. Your the central message of the climate consensus is… is wrong, of course. Try to avoid confusing science and politics; it will help you think more clearly -W]

Actually, this previous comment by yours truly on the same thread might be even better:

“So, as they taught me long ago in uni, the necessary precondition for communication is the establishment of trust.

I don’t necessarily have to believe what you say. But in order to communicate, I have to believe at a minimum that you believe what you say.

Which puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I believe that increased concentrations of CO2 do warm the planet, although I don’t know (and I don’t believe anyone else knows) what the sensitivity of the atmosphere is to those increased concentrations. So theoretically I should be easy to communicate with.

However, Mann won’t admit error in his work. Jones instructed colleagues to delete emails. The leading proponents of vigorous action to combat climate change have personal lifestyles that are sybaritic at best and baselessly debauched at worst.

Scientists working on what they say is the most important issue facing the planet refuse to even look at the work of their peers that is criticized, let alone to cooperate with those struggling to find understanding. The effort of BEST to establish a broader base of temperature readings and make them publicly available was vilified by consensus media outlets because of the participants. When, as everybody knew, the first findings were perfectly in line with other databases, the same sources crowed that this was a feather in the cap for the consensus and continued to vilify BEST members.

Bart, the people who believe as you do are in fact communicating. I don’t think that what they are communicating is really what you want.”

I actually think you’re confused. I’m not a scientist. I am a member of the polity. The difference between my position on the science and yours is probably paper thin. Our difference on the policy impacts is not.

Sums up Tom in a nutshell. Jones “asked”, not “instructed”. There’s a very real difference. “instructed” implies a hierarchy, which implies a level of global conspiracy which simply doesn’t exist. Fuller’s rantings over the years make clear that he buys into the conspiracy to some degree, at least (rather more, IMO, but clearly to some extent). Tom’s too good a writer – and wrote an entire book (with Mosher) about ClimateGate – to accidently have used the word “instructed”.

And I’m still waiting for an answer to my question (“Pachauri’s personal behavior is relevant to climate science how, exactly? Enlighten me, Fuller.”), which you describe as “a raving”. As WC noted above, your answer (to that and almost anything) is that “Al Gore is fat!”.

To which I’d add “climate science is a corrupt conspiracy”, corrupt as in your reference to Mann’s refusal to “admit error”, conspiracy as in your entire book about ClimateGate.

You’ve been involved in this stuff for years, Tom. That’s certainly enough time for you to have learned something, isn’t it? “Al Gore is fat, Mann’s a liar, and UAH is corrupt” is so ten years ago, man.

Don’t you have anything new? Oh, right, I forgot … “Pachuri has been accused of sexual harassment’…